to claim a career. It was about this time that
he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions,
pictures of private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world,
odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of
youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish
them, and gave them the name of _Sketches by Boz_.

They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this
almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the
smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive smartness which in these
earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy gibes in the
tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages bear witness both to the
energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment; he seems more
ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was
never stupid, but he was sometimes silly; and he is occasionally silly
here.

All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
_primum mobile_ of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
to create. I will not call it "the will to live," for that is a priggish
phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I suppose, have the
will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not:
he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these
early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens
of his spirit apart from his ma